Coda
Two days after Jacques Derrida died of pancreatic cancer, on
October 10 , 2004 , the readers of the New York Timessaw a
front-page obituary titled “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist,
Dies at 74 .” The Timesobituary called Derrida’s works “turgid
and baffling” and noted that he seemed to aim for an effect of
maximum incomprehensibility. When asked to define his
trademark term, deconstruction, Derrida would say only: “It is
impossible to respond” (so the Timesreported). The Times’s
farewell to Derrida was, to say the least, not respectful: rarely
has an obituary been so openly scornful of its subject. Why
such resentment, on the part of America’s newspaper of
record, for a renowned French thinker?
Jacques Derrida, along with a few other French theorists,
had spurred a great upheaval in the academic humanities, es-
pecially in literature departments: a revolution that decisively
moved university-level literary study beyond the reach of the
common reader. The average consumer of the New York Times,
the audience for its book reviews and discussions of the arts,
no longer understood what the professors were saying.^1 The
frustration that attended this revolution, on the part of those
unsympathetic to it, is understandable. Yet the rancor of the